Matt Kaeberlein, Ph.D.: rapamycin and dogs — man's best friends? — living longer, healthier lives and turning back the clock on aging, and age-related diseases

**Peter Attia** (0:04)
Hey, everyone, welcome to The Peter Attia Drive. I'm your host, Peter Attia.
The drive is a result of my hunger for optimizing performance, health, longevity, critical thinking, along with a few other obsessions along the way. I've spent the last several years working with some of the most successful top performing individuals in the world. And this podcast is my attempt to synthesize what I've learned along the way to help you live a higher quality, more fulfilling life. If you enjoy this podcast, you can find more information on today's episode and other topics at peterattiamd.com.
In this podcast, I'll be speaking with Matt Kaeberlein at the University of Washington. I met Matt about a year and a half, maybe two years ago through David Sabatini, who some of you may be familiar with, just based on all of his remarkable work around mTOR and rapamycin.
Matt's recognized globally for his research in the biology of aging. He got his PhD from MIT in the lab of Lenny Garante, who's produced a number of notable folks in this field. He went on to do his post-hoc at the University of Washington, and after completing his post-hoc, he has remained there and continues to run a fantastic lab. In this episode, we're gonna talk about his experience as the director of the Dog Aging Project, which as its name suggests, focuses on the animal model of dogs for its research. Now, of course, this is really interesting because while fruit flies and yeast and mice are interesting, dogs are obviously much closer to us. And of course, these dogs, because they're pets generally, have something really unique to us that virtually no other research animal has, which is they share our environment. And this puts them in a pretty unique spot that even the rhesus monkeys studied in the NIA Wisconsin project didn't have going for them. Now, if you haven't already done so, I'd recommend listening to the podcast that I did with David Sabatini because that will get you some of the background on mTOR and rapamycin. I think we get a little technical in this podcast, but I suspect it's something that if you've listened to that other one with Sabatini, you'll have the background to follow. And we talk about a bunch of other things that people seem to be interested in as well, beyond rapamycin and aging. We also talk about NAD, probably get into sirtuins a little bit. The other thing I really enjoy about speaking with Matt, and I had so many discussions with Matt, over meals and stuff where I think to myself after, man, I wish that was recorded because one, I want to be able to hear it again. And two, it's the kind of stuff that people are always asking me. And I think Matt just has such an amazing way of thinking about this stuff. Matt's work is really remarkable because it's actually focusing on health span. It's easier in some ways to study health span because you can study it over a shorter period of time. And in particular, when you look at the cardiomyopathy model, meaning it's a type of heart failure that dogs experience, and you look at how rapamycin can improve ejection fraction, you can get these answers in a really quick period of time. In fact, much quicker than I think Matt even expected. And we talk of course about cancer, heart disease and Alzheimer's disease. So if you're interested in rapamycin, if you're interested in mTOR, if you're interested in longevity, I think you're gonna find this interview very interesting. It was actually recorded initially in December of 2017 as part of the interview series I was doing for my book. And we may at some point throw up the video as well. You can find a lot more information in the show notes, of course. And without further delay, here's my conversation with the remarkable Matt Kaeberlein.
Matt, thank you so much for being here. It's really fantastic to be able to talk with you in this format.
I've been a huge fan of your work for many years now.
Obviously, I know quite a bit about your background, but I think it'd be great for the listeners to kind of get a sense of, what did you study in college? How'd you end up doing your PhD? Where'd you do it? And most of all, why'd it get you where you are?

**Matt Kaeberlein** (3:49)
Sure. So I got undergraduate degrees in biochemistry and mathematics at Western Washington University.
And then I went to graduate school at MIT, the biology department there. And my background up till that point had been in biophysical chemistry. So I really went to graduate school thinking I was going to work on structural biology or x-ray crystallography or something like that. And I heard a seminar by Lenny Guarente, who I ended up doing my PhD thesis with during my first semester at MIT, where he started talking about how his lab had begun working on the genetics of aging and trying to understand, you know, what are the factors that influence the rate of aging? And this was in yeast. That's what his lab worked on at that point.